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Chapter One:
Scarlett Adams wiped her dirty hands down the front of her jeans, wondering what her life had become. She’d only been at Last Chance Ranch for two weeks, but it felt worlds different than the life she’d left in Los Angeles, only thirty miles away.
That couldn’t be right. Thirty miles?
She sighed and scraped her sweaty flyaways off her forehead. Surely this place was at least three universes from the life she’d known on Earth.
This was your choice, she told herself as she surveyed the room holding more stuff than she’d ever owned in her life. Yes, her mother had called her and said her grandfather needed help. And Scarlett had seized the opportunity to leave the city, something she’d been wanting to do since her divorce had become final.
No, she wasn’t wearing skirts and silks and heels anymore. She’d thought those things made her happy, but she knew now that they didn’t. Of course, neither did sleeping as late as she wanted, wearing jeans all the time, and cleaning out years of her grandfather’s hoard.
So maybe she hadn’t thought through this life choice as much as she should have. But how was she to know Gramps hadn’t thrown anything away since Grams had died? It wasn’t like Scarlett came out to the ranch all that often, despite the short distance from her previous apartment to this sprawling piece of land in the Glendora foothills, right at the base of the Angeles National Forest.
She was still in California—it only felt like she’d blasted off to the moon and was trying to organize it.
She picked up a jar with an unknown substance in it, hoping it was well-sealed and would stay that way. Probably something Grams had canned decades ago. Maybe grape juice. Scarlett wasn’t entirely sure, and she wasn’t going to find out. She’d rented an industrial-sized dumpster that she filled faster than the sanitation department would come pick it up. She’d made great progress on the ranch, getting the homestead cleaned out, as well as the three spare cabins that sat just behind the main house.
There were thirteen other cabins that sat near the entrance of the ranch, along with that robot mailbox she’d loved as a little girl. She smiled thinking about the contraption her great-grandfather had welded together and which her older brother had dubbed Prime, because he’d been learning about prime numbers in school at the time and there was only one robot mailbox like the one guarding Last Chance Ranch.
Those cabins had been empty for a while, and Scarlett hadn’t done much to them to make sure they were habitable. If she wanted to save Last Chance Ranch, she’d need to fill them with men and women willing to work. She’d need to find a way to pay those people. And she’d need to figure out how to get Gramps to let go of some of the stuff he thought he couldn’t live without.
Scarlett knew what he was doing wasn’t considered living. And she knew that what he couldn’t live without he couldn’t get back. Grams.
Another sigh left her mouth, and she gently set the jar of whatever-it-was in the wheelbarrow she was using to haul trash from what used to be a sun room to the dumpster. Oh, yes, this would be a sun room again, and she’d sit here with Gramps while he drank black coffee and she sipped chamomile tea. Oh, yes….
She dug back into the work, ignoring the sun as it continued to beat down on her. Item by item piled into the wheelbarrow until she tried to lift it and could barely do so. She hefted it into position and started for the dumpster, which was concealed on the east side of the homestead. That way, when the director for Forever Friends, the animal organization Scarlett had contacted to come see the facilities at the ranch, arrived, she wouldn’t see all the trash.
In fact, Scarlett was hoping to get all the trash off the premises before Jewel Nightingale showed up. Considering that the woman hadn’t even responded to one of Scarlett’s emails or phone calls kept her resting easy at night.
Oh, and all this physical labor. That certainly had her sleeping like a baby in a way her marketing executive job never had.
She passed a half a dozen cars and trucks on her trek from Gramps’s place to the garbage container, and she had no idea what to do about those. Gramps claimed none of them ran, and Scarlett certainly didn’t have the skill set to fix them. She could probably sell them and get some much-needed cash for the ranch if she could get any of the engines to turn over.
“At least Gramps has all the keys,” she muttered as she approached the trash bin. She couldn’t lift the wheelbarrow up and over the lip of the dumpster, so she’d been throwing items in one at a time, or shoveling them in with a strong, plastic snow shovel she’d found in one of the barns.
How Gramps had ever bought a snow shovel in California, Scarlett wasn’t sure. But it worked great to get trash up and into the container.
In the distance, dogs barked from their runs in the area of the ranch Scarlett had affectionately called the Canine Club. Gramps loved the dogs too, and he spent most of his time with them on the north side of the ranch. When she’d asked him how many dogs lived on the ranch, he’d said, “Maybe twenty.”
“Maybe?” Scarlett hadn’t meant to screech the word. “You don’t know how many dogs live here?”
“There’s at least twenty,” he’d said again. And so, when Scarlett’s muscles screamed at her to stop using them so strenuously, she’d go out to the different regions of the ranch—Canine Club, Feline Frenzy, Horse Heaven, Piggy Paradise, and LlamaLand—and document what lived there. What breeds, if she could figure it out. How many dogs, cats, llamas, horses.
She’d searched on the Internet and asked Gramps dozens of questions about what the animals ate and how he paid for the food. He seemed to have a schedule of volunteers coming out every day, seven days a week, to walk dogs and play with cats.
Oh, and the ranch had come with exactly one cowboy—a man named Sawyer Smith who gave horseback riding lessons on Saturday mornings, took care of the horses and cattle, and managed the majority of the crops on the ranch.
Scarlett had hardly ever seen Sawyer in the two weeks she’d been at Last Chance Ranch, and that was just fine with her. At forty-three-years-old, she was not interested in another romance. Nope. Not happening.
She finished unloading the last of the trash from the wheelbarrow, the thought of returning to go through more garbage almost so depressing she could fall to her knees. But she didn’t. She kept her back straight and clapped her work gloves together, sending dirt and dust into the air.
The dogs were really barking up a storm.
Scarlett left the wheelbarrow behind as she stepped onto the dirt lane in front of the homestead and started down it. Another road forked to the left a ways up, and that led to Canine Club and several barns where the goats lived.
If she were being honest, goats terrified her, and she’d never been happier to have brought a friend with her to the ranch. Adele Woodruff had worked in the city with Scarlett, and she’d needed a fresh start somewhere with less smog—and less likelihood of a debt collector showing up while she was trying to answer phones. Adele lived in the cabin right next door to Gramps, and she’d been tending to the goats, claiming she had a great way to start bringing in cash for the ranch.
She wouldn’t tell Scarlett what it was though, but she worked in the pastures and goat arena for hours with the animals.
Scarlett didn’t see her as she passed the cat houses and entered the Canine Club. “What’s going on?” she asked Annie, a white bulldog mix who seemed to be the matron of the club. “Where’s Gramps?”
She opened the gate and entered the dog community, where she’d documented a whopping twenty-six dogs lived. “Maybe twenty” had been way off, and the budget to feed and care for these dogs exceeded what Gramps brought in from his social security and Grams’s death benefit.
Scarlett really needed the partnership of Forever Friends, and she needed it quickly. After deciding she’d call Jewel again once she got back to where she could wash her hands, Scarlett pushed her fear away.
She had a lot of savings, and while she’d lost a lot in the divorce, it wasn’t all monetary. She wouldn’t allow herself to think of Billy and Bob for more than a moment. A quick whisper of thought, and then gone. It hurt too much that she didn’t have her own fur babies with her on this ranch where twenty-six other dogs lived. Billy and Bob would’ve loved the Canine Club, and they should’ve been there with her.
“Gramps?” she called, the moment where she thought of her own dogs over.
He didn’t answer, but a distinctly male voice said, “Hey, do you own this place?”
Scarlett spun toward the voice to find a tall, dreamy man wearing a cowboy hat and holding a leash.
“Scooby?” she asked, sure this man’s name wasn’t the cartoon character. “What are you doing with my dog?” Anger and iciness was the only defense she’d have against this man, she could tell.
“He was out on the road,” the man said, glancing down at the big brown boxer. “Hound managed to make friends with him while I got the leash on.”
Scarlett noticed the golden retriever at the man’s side—no leash required. So he had enough charm to make dogs do things according to his command. Of course he did. Scarlett felt his charisma and charm tingling way down in her toes.
“I wasn’t sure if he came from up here or not. I just followed the sound of all the barking.”
“He belongs here,” Scarlett said, stepping forward to take the leash from him. “Scooby, you’ve got to stop digging under the fences.” And not just because Scarlett struggled to fill in the holes.
“I’m Hudson Flannigan,” the man said, reaching up with his now-free hand to lift his cowboy hat and push his hair back. He had dark sideburns and at least three days’ worth of a beard to match his salt-and-pepper hair, and Scarlett’s heart betrayed her by sending out a couple of extra beats.
He was her age.
So what? she asked herself in a harsh mental voice. She was used to looking for and finding details no one else did, and this man clearly hadn’t bathed in a couple of days. Probably as long as it had taken to grow that sexy scruff.
She gave herself a mental shake as she found the tattered cuffs on his jeans, the well-worn cowboy boots, the soft sparkle in his eyes. And the hint of grease under his fingernails.
“I noticed your mailbox on the way in,” he said, that voice like melting butter.
“What of it?” she asked, trying to keep a grip on Scooby, who probably weighed as much as she did. She almost scoffed out loud. That so wasn’t true. She was no lightweight, and though she’d lost ten pounds since coming to the ranch and starting the physical labor, she was easily still a size fourteen.
“It looked like it could use a tune-up,” he said. “Some of the pieces need to be welded together again.”
She narrowed her eyes at him. “And I suppose you’re just the man to do it.” Did he wander the foothills, looking for jobs?
“I could,” he said. “I’m a master welder and I’m not bad with horses either.” His dog laid down, his tongue out like this was the most boring conversation on the planet.
An idea formed in Scarlett’s mind. She definitely needed help with the horses. She’d been tending to them every morning and evening, but she had no idea what she was doing. “We have sixteen horses here at the ranch,” she said. “I have a guy who does riding lessons on the weekend.”
Hudson nodded and touched the brim of his hat as if to say, Point taken. You don’t need me.
“I can’t pay you much,” Scarlett said quickly. “But I have a clean cabin you can live in. Hound too. And you can fix that mailbox, work with Sawyer in Horse Heaven, and….” She cocked her head, sure she was right about him. “How handy are you with cars?”
